(CN) — To explain the horrific events taking place in Ukraine, a chilling narrative about Russia being a fascist state run by “the dictator” Vladimir Putin has taken hold in the West.
The problem is many experts on Russia's politics say it's a false or misleading rendering of why Ukraine is engulfed in war.
This narrative goes this way: Just like Adolf Hitler, Putin is advancing a blood-thirsty, imperialistic, nationalistic and revanchist ideology to build a greater “Russian world” and it's up to the West to stop him and save democracy.
In Ukraine, and increasingly in the West too, Russians are decried as “Ruscists” (a term merging Russians and fascists), Putin is demonized as “Putler,” Russian troops are called “orcs” and Russia is the “Land of Mordor,” the fictional land of dark evil forces in J.R.R. Tolkien's books.
But this damnation that Russia is a new fascist power intent on world domination is not just false but dangerously inflaming a war that poses the risk of escalating into a world war, according to experts who study Russia and Putin's regime.
“Since the mid-2000s, accusing Russia of being fascist has become a central narrative among Central and Eastern European countries, as well as among some Western policy figures,” wrote Marlene Laruelle, a French scholar and Russia expert at George Washington University. She is the author of the 2021 book “Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West.”
Among those who have accused Russia of fascism are Hillary Clinton, Prince Charles, Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, prominent Yale historian Timothy Snyder and a number of Putin's political rivals, including Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master and political activist.
It's a thesis reinforced at the highest levels with U.S. President Joe Biden calling Putin a “butcher” and “war criminal” who must be removed from power. Politicians in Europe too routinely make the Hitler-Putin comparison.
In April, after French President Emmanuel Macron talked about the need to negotiate with Putin, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki shot back: “One should not negotiate with criminals, one should fight them ... Nobody negotiated with Hitler. Would you negotiate with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot?”
The Putin-Hitler comparisons are promoted by magazines, newspapers and television news channels that regularly feature images of Putin looking deviously evil.
Nicolai Petro, a Russia expert at the University of Rhode Island, said using the fascist label “is commonly used to insult, rather than to illuminate.”
“There is no serious political project or party associated with the 'Russian World' in Russia today,” he said in an email to Courthouse News.
“This accusation performs the simple role of reducing Russia to being Other than the West, embodying everything that is not desirable for the West,” Laruelle wrote in an essay before the invasion. “If 'Putin is Hitler,' as some profess, who would want to negotiate with him and try to rebuild a constructive dialogue with Russia?”
In a more recent essay, she argued that using the fascist and Nazi label against Russia is “an easy, intellectually lazy way to make Putin understandable and predictable” and that it “does more to obscure than to shed light on our range of policy options for ending the conflict.”
Of course, those who accuse Putin's Russia of being a fascist state have ample evidence to draw from.
Exhibit A: Hundreds of people defined as political prisoners – among them high-profile political figures such as Alexei Navalny – languish in Russian penal colonies. Since Putin ordered a full-scale attack on Ukraine, police have cracked down on anti-war protests. Recently, a councilor in a Moscow district, Alexei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years for opposing the war.